Re: [HACKERS] Developer's Wiki

Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> writes:

> The other lesson of Wikipedia is that maintaining wiki quality for a generally
> editable wiki requires a full-time dedicated staff. We don't even have any
> volunteers who have 4 hours/week to commit to cleaning up the wiki, unless
> you're volunteering.

Bullshit. Most pages on wikipedia don't require any attention from such staff.
There are *millions* of pages constantly being updated something that only
works because of that dynamic. Only a small number of pages need any special
attention.

The wiki has been sitting there for two weeks and hasn't had any problems.
It's already getting more attention and updates than the techdocs wiki which
still has articles up from 2001 that are no longer relevant and in some cases
are actively misleading.

Putting barriers up blocking people trying to help isn't any guarantee of
quality. What it does guarantee is irrelevance.

> This is *particularly* true of the TODO stuff. We simply don't want Joe User
> adding their personal wishlist to the TODOs, and that's exactly what will
> happen if the TODO list is world-writable. TODOs should be items which have
> been hashed out here on the Hackers list, and the wiki page should list the
> specification which is the general consensus.

Frankly that's what we have today and that's why it's useless. Things only get
put on the list when everyone who cares already knows what has to be done and
then nobody looks at it because there's nothing there they don't already know
about.

A TODO list people can freely add stuff to is precisely what would make it
useful. It would have things we don't already know.

--
Gregory Stark
EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com